Hi! Its been such a long time since I last posted. How have you been? I hope everyone is doing well at home. Was just a little caught up with restarting the Restaurant and setting the basics up again. Now that we have fallen into a routine, I am able to get some time out for this too. And I hope to keep this up in the future as well.
Well today’s post will not be about Food. We are going off track today. I have been wanting to share this with you since my last post but could not. I’ll be sharing a short story with you today that I had written for a Literary Competition some time back. Well it was just a try and I didn’t win anything but I still wanted to share it with all of you. Hope you like it.
THE FORLORN MOBY
It was not a suicide. It was murder. And I could have saved him. I wish I’d been there earlier. It might have made all the difference. So all I can tell you is why he was murdered.
Prabhakaran Shetty or Prabhu, as he was lovingly called, was a shy and reserved, teenage boy of 15, who lived with his parents at a Navi Mumbai locale. They had shifted to a 1BHK flat on the 10th floor, from the suburbs of Mumbai last year. It was a small apartment but still a huge improvement over the tiny, almost unventilated place they used to reside in. The locality too was quieter, greener and nicer than the one they had left behind. The only drawback was that it was far from the workplace of both his parents. The father worked in Fort and the mother in Kalbadevi. It was a whole day of travel and work. But the work was not limited to the office, it often bundled itself up and came home in briefcases. The race was on and Shetty’s were not shying away from it. They were in it to go the distance and even win. So, a little extra time for office work was not an issue in the household. On the contrary, it was considered a sign of progress and a way to promotion, which meant a bigger bonus for maybe a new LED TV, Laptop or even a Car. Family time was limited to Shopping Sundays, an occasional movie or a get together now and then. Days were hectic, the nights tiring and apprehensive, for the pressure of next day and the day after that. But that was the life Shetty’s had chosen for themselves and they were content with it. They had been able to afford their own home in a place like Mumbai, where real estate was a luxury most could not indulge in. They had worked hard to procure as many comforts as possible for the family. Life was good, or so they believed.
Prabhu was a lean, tall and dark teenager, who had always been a little aloof, not mixing with others of his age, keeping to himself and his laptop or phone. It was not unusual for a teenager to be spotted with a smart phone these days. It was like a given, a mandatory tool for the development of the child. Even schools persuaded parents to give the child an access to a laptop or a phone, as it aided with the child being technologically proficient in this day and age. So, there he was, a 15 year old, proficiently using the technology of the future. And he was good at it. He could solve a lot of IT problems on his own and could also help his classmates if ever they asked for it. He had to change his school due to shifting as the old one, in which he had been studying since the beginning, was too far now. He had been a little upset with this and had a few troubles adjusting to the change. But it was not a very evident and profound reaction and it looked like it had just ruffled his feathers a little. So it was not pondered on by anyone.
Because Prabhu was an introvert, he spent a lot of his time alone, engrossed in himself and his technology. As inactive as his social life was in reality, he was quiet active on the digital media. There were things he wouldn’t share with anyone, that he would share online, with people or entities, he did not know or had not met. It was all a virtual reality, and he was an active member of this. It had become so much a part of his life now, that the reality of this virtual world had superseded the one he lived in. His interactions with everyone else, except his gadgets, was reducing with every passing day. But there were no alarms sounding around him, that would lead anyone to believe that some issue needed to be addressed. As far as everyone at school was concerned, the boy, who was always in his cocoon, was behaving as he always had, maybe a tad bit more.
At the home front, things were going on as usual. The parents came home after the whole day had passed and were too tired or too occupied to notice anything out of the ordinary. Their kid was keeping busy with himself and his obsessions, and they could easily devote more time to their work or social life. In all this running around, they failed to notice small things. Things that would have otherwise raised red flags. These were very minute details that were misread or outright overlooked on the part of the parents.
It was peak summers of that year. The sun was ready to burn everything that came in contact with its rays. The mercury was trying to free itself from the thermometers. That, with the humidity of Mumbai, had made it almost impossible to do anything. And even in this type of weather, no one noticed that Prabhu was going around in a full sleeved hoodie and a track pant, throughout the day, not feeling the need to wear a shorts and T-shirt as the weather demanded. No one paid any heed to the fact that there was a whole day where he didn’t speak a single word with anyone. That his sleeping patterns had changed drastically, or that he was confined to his room for most of the time. His headphones were always on his ears and the laptop was always on. There was a flickering light visible under his door every night, past 4:20 am. He was spending a lot of time on the roof of his 13 storey building. That he even left the house at ungodly hours at night a couple of times.
On that fateful day of June, it was raining cats and dogs in the city since the previous night. The weather and the atmosphere was dull and gloomy. The watchman of the building was in the middle of a nap, because it was still very early in the morning and there was no activity going on around the locality. At that moment, out of nowhere, there was a loud thud, followed by a sound like someone had thrown a ripe watermelon from the roof, shattering it into a hundred pieces. The guard woke up with a start at the sound and rushed out of his post, to have a look at the source of the sound. He rushed to the end of the building, to find that there was someone lying, face down, on the ground. The day was still to break, and the dawn light was not enough to make out as to who was lying there, and what had transpired. So he unhooked a torch from his waist, switched it on, and dreading the outcome, started towards the person, shouting out, asking who it was. But there came no reply. As he reached closed enough to ascertain the situation, he realised that it was a body and someone had fallen from the building. He immediately started blowing his whistle and went straight to the house of the Secretary of the society. The commotion also got a few more doors to open and people started pouring out with sleepy eyes. The Secretary till then, had already seen the body and had recognised the victim. He sent the watchman to fetch the family of the deceased and called the police. PCR vans were at the scene in a few minutes and they cordoned off the area, and started questioning the people around, but could not gather much as no one knew what had happened. The body was then sent for post mortem.
The sight was heart wrenching. The parents were devastated. The mother was sobbing inconsolably and the father was just standing there, disbelief in his eyes, watching the spot where his son had fallen, nodding or shaking his head at the questions thrown at him by the inspector. The Shetty’s had lost their son, and they had no inkling of what happened and how it happened. Prabhu was gone. His lifeless remains were being transported in a van to the city morgue. They wanted to run towards him, pick him in their arms and wake him up, shake him up, and cry, cry till there were no more tears, cry till there was nothing left, just an emptiness, the way they were feeling inside right at that moment. But that was not possible, he was evidence at that time, off limits, taken to be dissected and stitched again, before they could hold him again for one last time.
The post mortem revealed some disturbing facts. The first thing that the examiner noticed were the injuries on the body that were not because of the fall, but looked self inflicted. Some irregular cuts on the arms and legs. A weird shape carved on the forearm that resembled a fish. Some more cuts and incisions with weird letters and numerals engraved on the arms. And ultimately the broken bones and skull from the fall itself.
The Investigative Officer, also found some curious, yet troubling things. A blade was found in Prabhu’s bathroom, that was later confirmed to be the one used for inflicting the cuts. On close search of the laptop and smart phone confiscated, it came to light that there was some unusual activity going on Prabhu’s social media profile. Things like weird status updates and selfies were posted in the duration of the past month and a half or so. The weirdest that they came across was #I_am_whale. By doing a quick search with the Cyber Crime Division, it was found out that the boy had succumbed to an online game known as The Blue Whale Challenge. This online game was a death trap going on for some time in Europe and Russia, targeting vulnerable teens and pushing them into doing various tasks for a period of 50 days before making them commit suicide. And suicide was what was stated in the Police record.
Prabhu was cremated. His ashes strewn in the holy river. A life ended. Destroyed after being mutilated. Harmed mentally and physically. But it was a SUICIDE.
No it wasn’t. It was a shout for someone to take notice. A call for attention. A cry for help, for love and affection. It was a silent scream of a soul being crushed to nothingness. A scream we should have heard when we had the time. A soul we should have saved when it was still alive. The time we should have given, when it would have mattered, when it was not futile as it is now. It wasn’t suicide. It was MURDER. The death is on us. The death is on me. I am the Murderer. I am Prabhu’s Father…
The Blue Whale Challenge was reported to be an online Suicide Game aimed at teenagers which set 50 tasks over 50 days. The challenge was alleged to be linked with numerous deaths around the world. I wrote this story when there was a lot of buzz around this game and its effects. Teenagers committing suicide was a major news flash and it was sending a wave of tremors across the globe. Parents and Doctors everywhere, were on high alert, scrutinising and analysing the life of kids. This story was a part of a Competition where the contestants were given a small Write-up around which they had to spin their story. The Write-up for this one is the first few lines in Bold. I hope you liked it. Thank you and take care. Stay Safe.